Everyone knows and loves Raspberry Pi, but what if you didn’t need additional peripherals to make it wireless. The Raspberry Pi 3 is here to provide you with the same Pi as before but now with double the ram and a much faster processor. The credit-card sized computer is capable of many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and playing high-definition video and games. It can run several flavors of Linux (and even Windows 10 free-of-charge) and is being used to teach kids all over the world how to program… Oh yeah, and it still does all that for about $40.

The secret sauce that makes this computer so small and powerful is the Broadcom BCM2837, an ARM Cortex-A53 64bit Quad Core Processor System-on-Chip. The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode and is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute. What’s that all mean? It means that if you plug the Raspberry Pi 3 into your HDTV, you could watch BluRay quality video, using H.264 at 40MBits/s.

The biggest change that has been enacted with the Raspberry Pi 3 is an upgrade to a next generation main processor and improved connectivity with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and BCM43143 WiFi on board. Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 3 has improved power management, with an upgraded switched power source up to 2.5 Amps, to support more powerful external USB devices.

The Raspberry Pi 3’s four built-in USB ports provide enough connectivity for a mouse, keyboard, or anything else that you feel the RPi needs, but if you want to add even more you can still use a USB hub. Keep in mind, it is recommended that you use a powered hub so as not to overtax the on-board voltage regulator. Powering the Raspberry Pi 3 is easy, just plug any USB power supply into the micro-USB port. There’s no power button so the Pi will begin to boot as soon as power is applied, to turn it off, simply shut down the Pi 3, then remove power. The four built-in USB ports can even output up to 1.2A enabling you to connect more power hungry USB devices (This does require a 2Amp micro USB Power Supply).

On top of all that, the low-level peripherals on the Pi make it great for hardware hacking. The 0.1" spaced 40-pin GPIO header on the Pi gives you access to 27 GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI as well as 3.3 and 5V sources. Each pin on the GPIO header is identical to its predecessor the Model B+.

Note: We are still waiting on the status on how this board may be export restricted due to certain qualities it possesses. We may just need to verify a small amount of information before processing your order and hopefully nothing beyond that. Please keep this in mind before placing your order. Our Export Compliance page is a great resource in case you have any questions.

Note: You will need the latest version of NOOBS for the Raspberry Pi 3. If this action is not completed your Pi will get stuck on a rainbow square boot screen. You can find the latest version of NOOBS here!